Products don’t sell themselves. The process of introducing a product to market is a serious undertaking. Unfortunately for many companies it’s merely an afterthought; a set of deliverables created from a checklist at the end of product development. When the level of effort and resources applied to the creation of the product dwarfs that of the launch, it’s no wonder product launches fail to achieve the sales velocity anticipated.

What follows are ten easily identifiable signs that help forecast if a product launch may be in trouble. Signs you can address and fix before the launch becomes a disaster.

Case studies have always been an interesting pain point for most technology organizations and marketers.  You always need more (according to sales), they are difficult to push through to completion and no one in sales uses them once they are done because many times they are fact free, devoid of numbers and generally represent a feel good piece about your product or company which doesn’t help a buyer decision anything or discern why they should further evaluate your product/solution.

Sales Has Some Needs, Ideas and Some Candidates For You!

The typical case study process starts with a sales feedback session and as you would suspect — they need more stuff.   We can always debate if they ACTUALLY need more stuff, but why wouldn’t you want more case studies anyhow, right?  After all, sales is kind enough to give you a handful of companies to talk to, but 99% in the list can’t do one due to some corporate policy or other lame reason like being too busy, but y’all luckily find that 1 which says “yeah we can do a case study if you want”.

It may not be the one you wanted, it’s in a corner case industry for your product, but it’s the one you got and the next time you talk to sales it’s like: “Victory! We have a case study in progress and MARCOM is working with the customer”.

Ready, Set, Write!

So it’s off to the races and it’s a pretty straight forward process for the person in MARCOM who’s been assigned to get it done:

• Interview the contact
• write a little
• work the approval process with the customer
• 3-6 months later you may or may not have case study.

Providing you are lucky enough to get final approval,  you probably have  some watered down document which doesn’t work for sales or the marketplace at large and looks something like this from a flow perspective:

• Generic statement that “we worked with big or not so big company to do stuff”
• Customer Company overview with Logo
• Perfectly reverse engineered problem statement
• Quotes about how nice your product is in sidebar call outs from Jeremy,  the Project Manager
• Your company’s boiler plate

There could be any number of reasons why this happens, the contact wasn’t the the right one, we asked the wrong questions or we just couldn’t get the cool content through their legal – some competitive differentiation/advantage thing.   While, it would be great to think our products do actually provide a competitive advantage, most case studies aren’t discovery sessions around how well the implementation went, it’s a checklist of questions which MARCOM  goes through like case study best practice robots.

Asked, Answered and Outta Here

In many companies it’s MARCOM which works the checklist of obvious questions with no real involvement from Product Marketing or Management and the main reason is they have a list of questions which they have used historically and the cookie cutter questions typically get the job done.  Pretty formulaic stuff for most technology companies.   In fact it is so formulaic that MARCOM may even outsource it, because it so easy – after all we have the corporate communications template, the style guide and a list of questions we can hand off to anyone.

Once we get the answers to the questions we have a case study right?  Probably not, more than likely we have yet another document which sales won’t use and buyers won’t find any real benefit from.  So what can you do to improve the likelihood that you will have something of value when done?  Notice I didn’t say case study, since not all customer stories are really case studies.

Qualify the Case Study

While case study candidates are hard to find, fluff pieces immortalized in Adobe aren’t that helpful to most sales people or buyers.  Try to better understand why someone/a company might want to do a case study.   It’s not that hard, just ask them “So why are you looking to do the case study?”  The types of answers will vary, but might look like:

• Hey our marketing guy thinks it will improve our SEO
• To fulfill some contract term which got slid in for a 55% discount.
• We reduce cycle times by 12%, increased utilization by 3% and lowered costs by 8% resulting in an additional $18M in profit in the first 6 months.
• I selected the solution, I think it’s implementation will improve my career, so let’s put it in print – k?

So there are lots of answers you could get back and other drivers than true partnership with your company or success with your product which could make a organization want to talk about their implementations.  It’s these type of nuances which makes MARCOM and definitely an external third party probably not the right resource to work the process via a hand off from sales.   In fact, why does sales often represent the starting point for case studies and not professional services?

Conversations, not Case Studies

So as you have probably guessed it might be best to not go in search of case studies, but to have regular conversation with recent implementations and find out how folks are using your product.  While having these conversations you just might find a real case study, a customer focus blog post or other quicker to write (and get approved) web content piece which would help buyers in the discovery process better understand the problems solved by your solutions/product.

I know — sales still wants case studies, but I betcha they would be really cool with video testimonials though.  It also just might be easier to get big brands with a video approach.  How?    Have MARCOM setup a video camera at the next users conference and solicit participation in quick 60 second testimonials around your products, after all everyone loves your product at the user conference and you can slip in some “right to post/tape language” in your click through license for the online conference registration.   Just an idea…..

Other Product Management, Case Study and Content Related Stuff

• The Boring Web Content Challenge (mpdailyfix.com)
• The State of Product Management: Tweets, Conversations and Near Quotes…. (spatiallyrelevant.org)
• Case Studies in Perspective (altitudebranding.com)
• Putting Listening to Work with Customers (conversationagent.com)
• Have a Case Study But Don’t Know What To Do With It? Guest Blogger, Angela Kambarian Has Some Suggestions… (hilarytopper.com)
• Content Marketing is for Customers Too! (myventurepad.com)

• Now that’s an adhesive concept you can’t shake.
• It’s kinda like that  mid-January cold you get every year.
• <insert other made up silly thing which wouldn’t be as effective as sticky>

While regional deltas in culture and other contextual considerations are imperatives for advertisers, all actions needs to support the brand’s promise which typically doesn’t vary by region or by the sporting season.

So the biggest challenge/conflict for the brand probably is that per Yum! Brands website, the parent company of KFC is they believe “Making progress in diversity is a business priority and the work of everyone in our system.”  So while they have estensive processes and compliance requirements for their suppliers of foodstuffs, they may not have that level of review or scrutiny for ads.  I’m thinking there is a new review process in the works at KFC/Yum! Brands and probably a new agency search underway, at least in Australia based on this cricket match commercial.

1. Execution and Strategy are not just a function of big ideas, but also principles
2. Sometimes a target market is small and that’s ok.
3. Product Management doesn’t need to be hard, but it is more often than not.
4. Product Roadmaps are typically not more than telling a story.
5. There are way too many smart people and you need to listen more than you talk
6. Social Media is changing how most of us are doing our jobs.
7. You always need to think about how what you do is received by others.
8. Brands and Products have to be easy to build and buy.
9. Brands, Products and Cultures are not easily separated
10. Increasing Market Share is a brand strategy, not a product strategy

Perhaps we are just entering the “no original thought” part of social media.  Pirates, defenders, advocates, rouges, creators, lurkers, trolls, detractors, blah, blah, blah…. Brands in social media need to change their approach to engaging and listening needs to central to the brand’s digital strategy and anyone that doesn’t already know this is just 1 bad quarter from a new job or no job.

Again, NOT to pick on Krista, because she did nail it and is further spreading the word which everyone needs to know, so take a look, since she did get a slot in Vegas which is no small feat:

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• The Ten Step Social Media Marketing Checklist (crowdspring.com)
• Social Media, What Do You Want From It? (newmediachatter.com)
• Social Media Engagement: Marketers Become Measurement Platforms (socialmediatoday.com)

Even if you don’t agree with evil marketing, you want people to use your stuff. Right? Right. That’s why you shared it with the world in the first place. Whether it’s open source or commercial, you should do right by your project by pimping it effectively.

Compares the marketing copy of Prototype.js vs JQuery as a case study. (Prototype is losing marketshare to JQuery and really needs an overhaul.)